It’s all too easy to lose focus and direction for your life and your work. One day you wake up and realize you have forgotten or lost why you do what you do, or where exactly you want your life to go. You realize you’ve been knocked off your path and lost your drive. Unfortunately, life is great at kicking you down in some way or another. Without your goals in front of you—and sometimes even when they are there—it’s all too easy to lose your focus.

Goal-setting for your practice and your life is the way you narrow down and find the answers to the big questions: “Why do I do what I do?” “What do I get out of all this?” “What should I get out of all this?” Without answering these questions, you can’t achieve your goals. They give you a direction and a purpose, allowing you to cut unhelpful and unhealthy things out of your life. They set a path out for you to achieve specific goals, so you can make the changes you need to make a little more each day.

But life is great at getting in the way. Little things like busyness and struggles can distract you and keep you from making changes to achieve those goals. Sometimes those distractions are big things, like illnesses, death in the family, divorce, injuries, and so on. Others are smaller but no less distracting. Employees suddenly quit, equipment breaks, you lose money. You get distracted and stop working toward those goals, and even lose the answer to your “why” you do what you do in the first place.

That’s why goal-setting is such a central part of Top Practices. It enables us and our Mastermind members to continually come back to our “why.” It provides that organized focus you so desperately need to keep going and live the kind of life you want to live.

Recommitting to your goals is what you need to do to get back on track when you’ve lost your focus. Answering your big “why” questions—and plenty of others—once more helps you renew your goals and start working toward them again.

If you feel you’ve lost your focus and don’t really know the purpose of your practice, why you go to work each day, or even how to tell you’ve gotten off track, take some time to reevaluate and recommit. This is something we do regularly at Top Practices with our members. You don’t even have to wait until you’ve lost your way to get started. If you’d like to know more about why goal-setting matters and our process for doing so, check out our website or contact us for more information. You can e-mail [email protected] or call (717) 725-2679.